My brother summed up the lockdown beautifully this evening. In the words of a friend of his, he said, it has been the most brilliant time. Everything that had been depressing him had now gone. He had done it all and organised it all. His life was tidy, and he wondered if the Government might consider doing it every year.
This could not be more true for me as well. I have been having the most wonderful time, spending my days absorbed in busy things without needing to drop the paintbrush and rush off to try and get ready for work in a mad dash at the last minute.
I always finish up doing this, it is one of the difficult things about going to work at nights. When you work in the morning you make yourself a regular little routine, starting with coffee and the usual fussy little bathroom adventures, then there is the whole rigmarole of packed lunches and tidying up. By half past seven it is all done, all at exactly the same minute every single day, and you stroll off to work, worrying if you happen to be four minutes late because you know perfectly well that gridlock hell happens exactly three and a half minutes after you have gone through the traffic lights.
It is completely different when you work at nights. No routine happens then ever. You have got to be really organised to finish your absorbing daytime occupation in time to get ready for work, and many are the nights when you are faced with the stark choice of Pringles for your packed lunch, or being half an hour late whilst you make sandwiches and try and decide which is your favourite fruit to have with them.
Never bananas. There is something uniquely horrible about a lunchbox banana.
I have not had this problem since March, bu which I mean the being late for work, not a lunchbox banana. I have had months and months without being anxious or cross or exhausted, and little by little, all the jobs which have been depressing me because they are just too big and unmanageable, are getting done.
Today it was the turn of the bathroom.
It should have been impossible, because Mark was going to take the floor up.
As it happened, he didn’t, because Elspeth needed a new hydraulic motor fitting to her climbing tower, ready for the glorious approaching day when people will not fearfully suspect that they might get horrible diseases from climbing up towers.
She offered him some cash and so of course he went.
I stayed at home to make the bathroom beautiful.
I had decided that it was not beautiful because it had unlovely grout. This is the white stuff that goes between the tiles, except it was not white. It was grey and splotchy, and yellow in places.
I had suggested to Mark that we re-grout it, and he had looked a a bit supercilious and said that perhaps we ought to clean it first.
It has not been cleaned since those heady long ago days when I had a cleaner.
I agreed that perhaps it needed cleaning. He said that it would not be a good idea to try and put grout over the top of mouldy old grout anyway, and we should clean it.
Today I cleaned it.
My hands are still sore.
I scrubbed and wiped and scrubbed some more.
It was black mould, of course, but also every kind of other grime imaginable in a bathroom. I am sure there were still fingerprints left over from Ritalin Boy’s last visit.
I took the shower curtain down and soaked it in bleach.
Then I took the shower rail down. It had gone rusty, so I took it outside and sanded the rust off it. This felt very satisfyingly independent, who needs a man when you can sand rust off things yourself?
I was so pleased with the result that I hunted through Mark’s shed and found a substance called Kurust, which seemed to promise to rid the world of rust, although in actuality it just glued it to the shower rail and coated it with a sort of sticky veneer. It also turned my hands an unexpected purple colour, which mostly came off later when I was trying to clean the tiles, so I had to scrub that off them as well.
I painted the ceiling, and then recalled that I am a modern independent woman and so in the spirit of sanding rust off things, I would grout the tiles myself as well.
It turned out to be harder than you might imagine, and I had had enough of it very quickly indeed.
Mark came home a couple of hours later to find about six tiles grouted, and tile grout all over me, and the carpet, and the sink.
He said politely that it looked very nice, and that he would help me to clear up the mess. Then he made us a restorative cup of tea, and we were just drinking tea when some of our neighbours dropped round, in a socially distanced sort of way.
We had such a nice time that before we knew it it was almost eight o’ clock, and there was a frantic scramble to feed Oliver and tidy up.
We did not finish the tidying up. We are going to go to bed in a mess again. What a jolly good thing that we didn’t have to go to work.
Something else nice happened today.
Once, long ago, Mark hoped to inherit a tractor from his father. This is the father who as you might recall, is still in a box on top of our grandfather clock, we really do need to do something about that. There was some family dispute about this, and the tractor went instead, perfectly reasonably, to one of his sisters.
Mark was disappointed about this, and I was relieved, because I do not think we are particularly short of ancient rusty tractors that do not go, most especially not in the back yard of a terraced house in Windermere. Anyway, we forgot about it almost instantly, and carried on with our tractorless lives, with resignation in Mark’s case and a feeling of having had a reprieve in mine.
Today we had a letter from his mother, who had been feeling troubled that Mark had wanted a tractor and then not been able to have one. This goes to show that if you want real sympathy and understanding, sometimes the only person to turn to is your mum.
She sent him some money in its stead.
She said that he could either put it towards a tractor or something else he needed in this difficult time.
He was very pleased indeed, and wondered aloud about looking at tractors.
Wouldn’t you think after being married for all these years he would know better?
Have a picture of a buzzy tree and a newly blackened chandelier.
